


Walking Backwards Around The Sun

by Trixree



Category: One Piece
Genre: Ace Lives, Eventual Smut, Identity Reveal, Implied eventual Marco/Ace/Sabo, Let little Ace say fuck, M/M, Marineford who, i dont know her, im righting odas wrongs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-13
Updated: 2019-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-08 02:28:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21782071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trixree/pseuds/Trixree
Summary: They are children when they meet among the trash heaps of the grey terminal. They are children when they fall in love in the jungle of Mount Corvo. They're children and they're in love and they're the only friend the other has in the entire universe so... they become brothers about it.(Ten years later it turns out they're still fighting the same old demons.)Alternatively titled: "Sabo's Handy-Dandy Guide For How To Save Two Lives At Once. Also, War."
Relationships: Portgas D. Ace/Sabo
Comments: 16
Kudos: 130





	Walking Backwards Around The Sun

“Hey!” A young voice shouts from across the trash heap. Sabo’s elbow deep in a pile of garbage— _ salvage _ —when he hears it and realizes that someone’s talking to  _ him.  _ (People tend to ignore children in the grey-terminal. Dirty, hollow-faced children scrounging through mountains of stinking trash and forgotten things can only invoke pity and a willful ignorance in most. It’s not like the people that are around to notice are any better off, really. So, it's generally agreed that it is better not to acknowledge children out here.) 

“ _ Hey!”  _ The voice calls again, finally prompting Sabo to squint up towards the towering peak of discarded appliances he’s been occupied with for the past hour or so. 

A boy about Sabo’s height is silhouetted by the sun. He doesn’t look happy, by the looks of it. “What?” Sabo responds. 

“Fuck you!” 

“ _ What?”  _

“I said, ‘fuck you’!” 

“ _ Hey!”  _

“Don’t ‘ _ hey’  _ me,” the boy shouts, suddenly pitching himself forward and sliding down the side of the pile. He stops a few steps away from Sabo. “Go find another shit-heap, this one is mine.” 

The kid is the same height as Sabo with shaggy, dark hair and a scowling face full of freckles.  _ His eyelashes are really long _ , Sabo notes.  _ There’s no way he’ll grow into the size of those things.  _ It’s almost infuriating how many freckles he has and how long his stupid, girly eyelashes are. Sabo is  _ doing something here,  _ dammit. 

“No way! I’ve been here since noon, I’m not going  _ anywhere. _ ” 

“And  _ I’ve  _ been here since yesterday, dick-head. Get lost.” 

“I don’t buy it!” Sabo hisses, feeling himself getting louder and louder with each word. “Also, you can’t call  _ dibs  _ on a trash mound, it’s literally  _ trash! _ ” 

“Fuck you, gap tooth!” The kid spits, stalking forward with menace in each step. In his hand, he has what looks like a broomstick that’s been carefully sharpened to a point at one end. 

“Screw you, freckles!” Sabo hefts the length of pipe in his hand. He’d just pulled it from the heap before Freckles showed up and started claiming ownership of the dump. Sabo will show him. He’s sure he can take him. He’s beaten up guys  _ ten times  _ Freckles’ size, easy. This will be cake and then the heap is all his. 

Sabo makes the first move. 

He gears up to charge at Freckles when he suddenly and completely loses all footing. Oil from abandoned machinery had, unbeknownst to him, created a slick puddle on the hard-packed dirt. Sabo’s Oxfords were  _ not made for this  _ and he goes down,  _ hard.  _

_ Shit.  _ He braces for a blow that never comes. Instead— 

Freckles starts laughing. He laughs in huge gulps of air, his voice booming across the terminal like crashing waves. 

“_H_ _ oly shit,  _ that was the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen—” the kid manages between gasping breaths. Sabo scrambles to his feet to find Freckles completely doubled over in laughter, tears of pure mirth gathering in his eyes. “The pipe isn’t a bad idea though.” 

“You can’t have it,” Sabo snaps, suddenly defensive. 

Freckles starts laughing all over again. 

(This is how Sabo and Ace meet. This is how brotherhood is born.)

* * *

Ace doesn’t kill Gap-Tooth. He should probably  _ at least  _ beat him up. But, Gap-Tooth is kind of funny. And he’s also  _ smart.  _ (The pipe he tried to defend himself with? That’s  _ clever.  _ It's clearly got a weight to it and it definitely won’t snap the second Ace leans his weight on it the wrong way. It’s genius to use it and Ace  _ knows  _ he never would have thought of it…) 

So, Gap-Tooth is clever. Ace could use clever.

He’s good at fighting and mugging idiots and hunting down dinner but he’s admittedly pretty shit at the rest of it. So, once he’s finished laughing at the other kid, he goes for it. 

“Are you hungry?” Gap-Tooth balks at the question, looking for all intents and purposes like he’s about to either laugh at Ace or run from him. 

“Um, no?” Gap-Tooth replies, looking pretty damn confused. 

“Don’t lie, shit-head. I’m trying to be  _ nice,”  _ Ace hisses. 

“You suck at it,” Gap-Tooth replies without thinking. Ace can tell the other kid just snapped back at him without thinking because Gap-Tooth’s eyes widen comically as soon as the words are out of his mouth. He visibly steels himself and stares Ace right in the eye. 

Ace fidgets. “Well, yeah. But. I have meat?” He tries. 

Gap-Tooth’s eyes widen. They are very, very blue eyes, Ace notes. 

“Why?” 

“Um? Because I killed a boar?” 

“Why offer me food?”

“Who says I’m offering?”

“You  _ just said  _ you were trying to be nice!” Gap-Tooth shouts, throwing his hands up in the air and yanking angrily at his own hat. “Just, ugh. Why would you care if I’m hungry?”

_ Because you’re smart and all I’m good for is fighting. Because I can’t figure out how to cook half the things I catch and I keep getting food poisoning from them. Because I don’t want to go back to Dadan’s yet and you seem not boring.  _

_ (Because I’m lonely.)  _

“Dunno,” Ace says instead. 

They stare at each other for a moment. 

“Yeah,” Gap-Tooth says. “I could eat.” 

* * *

It’s the first meal of many.

* * *

“Who the hell is that?” Dadan shouts, glaring hard enough at Sabo to burn a hole through his head. Ace meets her beat for beat. 

“None of your business,” He grumbles as petulantly as a child can manage. 

“Hi, ma’am!” Sabo chirrups. He gives a little half-bow to the towering woman and comes up beaming like sunshine itself. Ace mimes gagging. “My name is Sabo, I’m friends with Ace.”

Dadan scowls but it’s better than screaming. “I’m not a ‘ma’am’ kid, but at least  _ you  _ have some sense of civility unlike  _ some ungrateful brats  _ I know.” She thumbs absently at the flask in her pocket. 

Behind her an impressively short bandit deadpans, “Wait, Ace has a friend?”

“Get fucked, Dogra!” Ace howls, rearing up like he’s gonna charge the man that had spoken. “I’ve got loads of friends, you fucking dipshit, you’re just not important enough to know about it!” He spits in the dirt, punctuating his rage. 

Sabo rolls his eyes.  _ Fucking typical,  _ he thinks, though he’s starting to become fond of the temper on the other boy. It’s outrageous but it’s  _ so different  _ from the life Sabo’s led up until this point that it’s almost refreshing in its unhinged nature, in its sheer  _ vulgarity.  _

Dadan smacks Ace upside the head with an enormous hand. “Watch your damn mouth, shitty brat!” 

Ace grumbles, but settles quickly. He  _ does  _ want to take a hot bath, afterall. They will definitely _not_ get one if he keeps ticking off Dadan. 

It’s not until about an hour later when they’re splashing each other with greater and greater amounts of hot water that Sabo realizes—Ace didn't protest when Sabo said they were friends. Honestly, he had expected more resistance but... It hadn't come. Ace had _defended _their friendship in front of that tiny Bandit man. 

_ Huh.  _

Ace slips on the wet floor of the bathroom and lands on his face. Sabo laughs until Ace kicks him hard enough in the shins that he stops. 

_ It could be us like this forever,  _ Sabo thinks.  _ No parents to tell us who or what we can or cannot be.  _

It is in this moment that Sabo thinks the word “friend” is not quite big enough to describe the feeling in his chest.

* * *

Ace hates it when Sabo gets all mope-y. There’s probably a better word for it, a more sophisticated way to describe what Sabo  _ does  _ and how Sabo  _ gets  _ sometimes— _ ”despondent”,  _ a voice that sounds stupidly fancy and stupidly like Sabo replies in his head—but whatever it’s called, Ace hates it. 

They sleep, more often than not these days, on the roof of the Mountain Bandit hideout. It’s a hot and humid summer and inside the hut the air is unbearably weighty and sticky with the smell of people and booze and sweat. Besides, when they’re up here like this, the glinting lights of the city are visible through the trees, beyond the grey terminal. The sound of cicadas cover them like a thick blanket.

Ace swings his feet idly. Sabo is hunched in on himself like he could cry if he had the energy. It’s  _ stupid _ . 

Ace swats him. When he doesn’t get a response, he swats him again, harder. “Hey, fuck-face,” he bites. (He knows he gets mean when he’s worried. He’s… working on it.) Softer he tries, “Sabo. Stop thinking about whatever you’re thinking about.” 

Sabo sighs. The sound is awful and heavy. 

“I saw my mother today in the city. At a distance, but. Still.” Ace freezes. Sabo doesn’t talk about his parents. Besides a one-off comment once about how they were shitty and the nobles are shitty and the whole damn city is shitty and horrible, that’s all Ace knows (all he  _ cares to know, thanks _ ) about Sabo’s life Before they met. 

(Ace thinks in the privacy of his mind that Sabo's life _Before Him _shouldn't matter because he didn't know Ace then so it must have been pretty awful. It's... _possessive _of him to pretend that Sabo doesn't have a life outside of him, that Sabo _didn't _have a whole life before Ace that led him to the Terminal. But still. He pretends.)

“She didn’t see me,” Sabo continues. There’s a momentary pause.

“My mother had this friend… another noble. They have a daughter about my age or something. When I turned eight, Mother took me to their house to meet the girl. She dressed me up and brushed my hair so much it made my scalp hurt and she put this cologne all over me and when we got there she introduced me to the girl and said, ‘Sabo, this is your fiance-to-be.’ I… I didn’t understand so I laughed. 

“When we got home, Father had a servant from the kitchen lash me on the back with his belt. Father said he would have done it himself but he didn’t want to dirty up the silk shirt Mother had just bought him. It was _imported, _after all," Sabo spits like he's expelling bile from his mouth. "Mother cried the entire time the servant hit me, but she was crying because she was  _ mad at me.”  _

“I’m gonna fucking kill them,” the sound of Ace’s own voice surprises him. He hadn’t intended to speak yet. “Sabo, I’m going to fucking kill them.” He can't hide the sincerity in his voice.

Sabo laughs and the sound is watery. “I don’t want you to. That’s the sick part, Ace. I hate them and I know they’re wrong but I… I miss them, too. I miss the way Mother smells sometimes and the way that Father would smile when I did something right in school. They’re  _ bastards  _ but they’re my parents and I  _ hate them  _ but I miss them and it… “

Ace watches Sabo’s shoulders raise into a rigid line and then begin to shake. He’s crying. 

“Ace, I hate them. But I miss them. And I hate feeling like this and I don’t know what to do,” he sobs. “What do I do?” 

Slowly, like he’s approaching a wild animal, Ace shuffles until he’s pressed against Sabo’s side. He grips Sabo’s arm tight and yelps in shock when Sabo immediately turns into his embrace, crying in deep, heavy sobs against his shoulder. 

“You stay with me,” Ace replies. “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll stay here and steal everything we can until we have enough money to set out on our own. We’ll be pirates and never have to answer to anyone ever again, just us two.” 

“What do I do with how I feel, though? It hurts so much,” Sabo hisses out through clenched teeth. 

The words come tumbling unbidden from Ace’s mouth. “My father is Gol D Roger and I killed my mother when I was born.” Sabo goes suddenly still against Ace. It feels like getting kicked in the stomach. Ace can feel his own heart come to a shuddering stop in his chest. 

“Ace…” 

He inhales and closes his eyes tight. “My father,” he repeats, “is Gol D Roger and I  _ killed  _ my mother when I was born. Sabo, I’m… I’m not meant to be alive. I’m  _ cursed.  _ I shouldn’t be here at all. I hate my father and I miss my mom and I never even got to  _ know  _ her. I don’t know what she looked like or how she sounded or what she smelled like… I have nothing to miss and it’s my shitty father's fault for dying and _my fault _for killing my mother, but I still  _ miss  _ her.  So I don’t  _ know  _ what to do. Don’t ask me that.”

They’re facing each other. Sabo’s eyes are wide and puffy and red with tears and his expression is unreadable, but he’s stopped crying. 

“Okay,” Sabo says with a sniffle. He touches Ace’s hand with his own and moves it until their fingers interlace and they're pressed, palm to palm. “We can figure it out together, then.” 

Ace pulls back, violently. Sabo sways with the movement and almost faceplants on the roof. 

“How can you say that!” Ace shouts. “After what I just told you?” He realizes his own shoulders are shaking, belatedly. “Why are you still here!? Why don’t you hate me, now that you know who I really am?! I shouldn’t even be  _ alive—”  _

Sabo lunges to his feet and shoves him,  _ hard.  _ “You’re an  _ asshole,  _ Ace, that’s what you are, but you don’t deserve to  _ die,  _ you absolute  _ moron!  _ What the  _ hell  _ would I do without you, huh? You just told me yourself, we’re gonna steal until we’re rich and then we’re going to  _ leave. Together.”  _

“Really?” he says through tears, watching Sabo’s chest heave for breath after all the shouting. 

“Yes, asshole. Really.” 

They stand in silence for a bit, slowly gathering what remains of their composure. Eventually, they sit back down, back to back, leaning against the other. 

“Ace?”

“Yeah?” 

“Did you mean it?” 

“Mean what?” 

“That you don’t deserve to be alive?” Ace waits a beat, but doesn’t respond, in the end. His silence is an answer enough. “Promise me something,” Sabo says. 

“Depends on what it is.” 

“God, you suck, you know that?” Another moment passes. “Ace, please don’t die.” 

The cicadas hum like an engine. They haven’t stopped all night, not once. The trees shake with a gust of wind that does nothing to cool the air. In the house beneath them, Dadan finally rolls over and manages to go back to sleep after all the shouting the two brats did. The city lights blink lazily in the distance, peeking over the treetops. 

“Okay. I promise."

* * *

“You should seriously be nicer to Luffy,” Sabo grumbles, kicking a stone idly down the path. 

“Yeah? And you should seriously shut the fuck up,” Ace replies, stomping along after him. 

“Whatcha guys talkin’ about?” Luffy chirps from behind, running on his impossibly small legs to try and catch up. 

“Nothing,” Ace and Sabo chorus in unison. 

“Seriously,” Sabo drops his voice to a whisper. “He really looks up to you and you’re being awful.” 

“He’s annoying.” 

“He cares about you.” 

“Yeah, it’s  _ annoying. _ ” 

“Asshole,” Sabo comments, swatting Ace lightly with the side of his pipe. 

“Fuck-head,” Ace hisses, swiping for Sabo’s feet with his own pipe. 

“Fuck-head!” Luffy shouts, laughing. 

“ _ Luffy!”  _ The two older brother’s chorus, Sabo chiding and Ace delighted. 

“Say it again,” Ace says the same time Sabo says, “Don’t repeat what Ace says.” 

Ace teaches Luffy every curse he knows that afternoon. It’s one of the best days they have, together. Just the three of them.

* * *

Sabo leaves them in the terminal. He _leaves them. _

Ace remembers his words, remembers the expression on his face when he spoke of his Mother and Father, remembers the story of the lashing, remembers the way Sabo’s back felt pressed against his that night on the roof. 

He watches Sabo’s back disappear into the distance. 

(Sabo does look back, is the thing. He looks back, the absolute bastard, and smiles at Ace and Luffy over his shoulder with tears in his eyes and grim determination in the set of his jaw. Luffy screams for him and Sabo turns and keeps walking.) 

Ace thinks, desperately, horribly, that he’ll never come back. 

* * *

(He doesn’t.)

**Author's Note:**

> Gshfhgjgshfjfk I do these things and I don't know why I do them. I've got the whole story mapped out and it should end up being three chapters in total! 
> 
> Find me on [tumblr](https://trixree.tumblr.com/)


End file.
